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teacher was an unacceptable alternative. This last, to be truthful, did not exactly make me feel sad. On the contrary. So many roads through life beckoned delightfully, it was almost a relief to find one blocked, one choice less.
    I stopped showing off with Coleridge-Taylor, closed the piano lid carefully, ashamed of Miss Gosse’s undeserved praise and at the same time glad of it.
    â€˜Miss Locke will be pleased!’
    When I had exclaimed ‘How pretty!’ what I had meant was the garden. The single good thing about the Chandos House dining-room was its french window which gave on to a lawn with lovely old untidy fruit trees growing out of it as if they had just that moment risen from deep down in the earth and were stretching their gnarled limbs in an ecstasy of light and air. Behind the trees were flowerbeds and shrubberies and vegetables, with a glimpse of fields beyond. Unlike the rest of the house that I had seen so far, the dining-room was bright with sun, so light that at eight o’clock in the evening there was still no need for gaslight to drink our Horlicks/ Bovril by. The garden was permeated with the golden warmth of evening. A blackbird sang in an apple tree. A shimmering veil of midges hovered above the grass.
    Miss Gosse said, ‘We often eat here with the window open in the summer. Would you like to have it open now?’
    I said that I should like it very much. Just at that moment Mrs Benyon came in with a tray with two mugs on it. She put the tray down on the dining table. My heart twanged with sorrow as I saw that there weren’t any cream crackers.
    Miss Gosse said: ‘Would you mind opening the french window, Mrs Benyon?’ And, to me, in explanation: ‘I’m afraid the bolt’s a bit high up for me.’
    Mrs Benyon looked out at the garden as if she couldn’t abide the sight of it. She said: ‘Mosquitoes,’ in her heavy, flat voice and went out of the room without doing anything about the bolt.
    â€˜She’s quite right, of course,’ Miss Gosse said brightly. ‘Mrs Benyon, as you’ll discover, is the practical one of our little household. Are you practical, Sylvia?’
    Not too sure, but anxious to make the reply which would do me the most good: ‘I – I think so.’
    â€˜Capital!’ exclaimed Miss Gosse. ‘That makes two of you!’
    I went upstairs again carrying hot water for my bedtime ablutions. Upon Miss Gosse’s instructions I had gone through another door, this time the one at the end of the hall, the door into the kitchen, a large, red-tiled expanse with the same aspect and consequently – though the window was much smaller and obstructed by some pot plants that were mottled rather like Mrs Benyon – some of the same light which had transformed the dining-room. I could hear the blackbird still singing.
    â€˜If you don’t see Mrs Benyon, knock on the door next to the dresser. That’s the door to her bedroom. She will have your hot water ready.’
    Relieved in some way I could not have explained that the housekeeper and I were to sleep on different levels, I went into the kitchen and found her on the point of emerging from her bedroom door, one she made haste to shut as soon as she saw the intruder into her domain. Hungry and emotionally stressed as I was, her hostility confused me. So far in my life, so far as I could tell at any rate, most people seemed to like me – at least they acted as if they did. As a result, I had not yet encountered enough of the other kind to have evolved the right technique for dealing with them. That was why I always found myself struck dumb in the presence of Mrs Crail, for instance, and it was exactly the same with Mrs Benyon. She floored me with her utter lack of love, not a speck of it showing through the thick crust of her withering indifference. I wondered fleetingly whether the housekeeper, as the headmistress was reputed to be, was another